video games, virtual worlds, education, philanthropy, stuff

My Other Accounts

This is the personal blog of Jesse Powell, co-founder and CEO at Kraken Bitcoin Exchange, formerly of Lewt, Inc.

I will be blogging on things that interest me, and where I think my perspective may be valuable to other people. I will not be blogging often.

Topics you can expect to see discussed include: video games, virtual worlds, education, philanthropy, philosophy, and probably to a lesser extent, politics, psychology, business and law.

It should be noted that I am still acting CEO at Kraken and advisor to Lewt. While I am not blogging here on the behalf of any company, I may to some degree censor my statements to protect their interests and my contractual obligations, especially when it comes proprietary and trade secret information.

If you're looking for news about Kraken, I suggest you follow @KrakenFX on Twitter. If you're looking for some Diablo 2 freebies, I suggest you follow @Lewt on Twitter.

Web/Tech

12/25/2011

I sold an item for 20k forum gold, gave first, the buyer never paid and when I filed a scammer accusation, MY account and remaining forum gold got locked and I was told I'd have to pay the thief 20k fg for making an unsubstantiated claim against him. WTF!? So, maybe I didn't have an air-tight case (do you ever?) but you'd think my reputation in the community would be worth something. No matter what, you shouldn't lock someone's account for reporting bad behavior--that's just absurd. I made an attempt to contact Paul (njaguar) directly without any luck. It appears he's taken great measures to hide himself from his customers. The more I talked about what happened to me the more horror stories I heard from other people about how they'd had their forum gold locked, their accounts banned, and for stupid stuff.. like saying something that the forum owner found mildly offensive to his religion. I mean, come on.. are you running a business or what?

There is a lot I don't like about d2jsp: You can't cash out, you can't sell your forum gold to other members, you can't talk about virtual item sellers, you can't arrange trades in non-forum gold currencies, you can't review bad traders, you can't even trust that the forum gold you've got is safe because your account could be banned at any moment for any or no reason. To some extent, I understand Paul's reasoning... a fearful and ignorant population is a population easily controlled, and to maintain his profits and keep the whole forum gold racket going he's gotta rule with an iron fist. Fortunately, I'm not the type to just complain and not do anything. I knew there had to be a better way.. d2jsp's failures left a lot of room to build something better, and that something is finally ready.

What Ogrr.com does better:

1. You can cash out at any time.2. You can arrange trades external to the site.3. You can discuss anything you want.4. You can review other traders.5. Users are treated as customers, not annoynaces.

You might be thinking.. "If users can cash out, how does Ogrr make any money?" Good question. We have some of the usual fluff you can spend money on but the truth is that I don't think Ogrr will be making much money. I'll be happy if it breaks even. I've got other businesses that are paying my bills. My goal with Ogrr is to give the community a better place to trade. I do think that Ogrr could become a huge thing though and I'm putting a lot of effort and capital in to it.

How will Ogrr allow users to cash in and out? Bitcoin.

If you haven't heard of Bitcoin by now, congratulations, you're not as nerdy as most of the other people reading this post. For the jocks out there, Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer crypto-currency... It works sort of like BitTorrent in that it's not controlled or owned by any one entity. If you haven't heard of BitTorrent, well, you're probably getting laid a lot more than I am so go ahead and congratulate yourself for that too. With Bitcoin, anyone in the world can send payments to any other person in the world instantly, irreversibly, anonymously and without fees. So long PayPal! But, if you still want PayPal, it's very easy to convert your Bitcoins to PayPal. There are numerous exchanges operating that allow you to convert Bitcoin and withdraw to just about any other currency/payments platform you want. More on that later.

Ogrr will take deposits via Bitcoin only but if you don't want to use Bitcoin you're free to arrange your trades on the forum in any currency you like.

How do people acquire Bitcoin in the first place?

Well, there is a process called 'mining' in which you utilize your computer's GPU to crunch numbers and 'find' Bitcoins. I'll leave it up to you to do your own research on this as it's a bit complicated. For beginners, I'd say you should forget about mining. The best ways to get Bitcoin right now are:

1. Be one of the first 1000 Ogrr.com users to make 10 posts and receive 1 free Bitcoin.2. Sell some items you've got on the forum to someone who already has Bitcoin.3. Buy Bitcoin directly from someone who's got it--a person, one of the exchanges.

It's difficult to sell Bitcoin for PayPal because PayPal has been known to ban accounts that are caught doing this, and because of the chargeback risk. Bitcoin is irreversible, PayPal is not so you can imagine that a lot of scammers would love to give you PayPal funds for Bitcoin.

In the United States there are many ways of getting dollars in to a Bitcoin exchange, including making a cash deposit at a local bank. In other countries, it will depend on how strict the banking system is. If your banking system is very tightly controlled, Bitcoin makes even more sense for you as it's beyond any government or bank's control.

1. Bitcoin payments are irreversible--the biggest problem for sellers.2. Bitcoin payments have no fees, making microtransactions (<$1.00) possible.3. Bitcoin payments are global, making borders meaningless and currency conversion unnecessary.4. No age or jurisdictional restrictions. Anyone with a connection can setup a Bitcoin wallet in minutes.

Bitcoin makes a lot of sense for a lot of other industries as well and we're already seeing many shops starting to accept Bitcoin. Soon enough, you may have no desire to convert your Bitcoin to other currencies. The social implications of global Bitcoin adoption are pretty awesome and I hope gamers can help pave the way for everyone else.

We're looking for honest feedback about Ogrr. If anybody's got anything to contribute, feel free to drop me a line here, on Twitter or post it in the site suggestions over at Ogrr: https://ogrr.com/forum.php?f=382

08/16/2009

I had some trouble figuring out how, with GoDaddy, to map the subdomain jesse.forthewin.com to my TypePad blog. To complicate things further, I was moving it from WordPress (mostly because Wordpress-hosted blogs can't use Apture). There don't seem to be any decent guides out there so here's how I did it.

Your Domain Manager should like this:

If your domain has been sitting parked, Total DNS should already be available to you. Since I was coming from WordPress, my first obstacle was to activate Total DNS on the domain. If your nameservers are anything other than the GoDaddy DOMAINCONTROL, you won't have access to Total DNS. To fix that, click on the Manage link under the Nameservers section of the Domain Manager. When you do, this box should pop up:

Select the first option: I want to park my domains. Click OK. It might take a few minutes to update, but when it does, your nameservers will be set to DOMAINCONTROL, and your Total DNS info will appear, with a link to Total DNS Control.

Note: It could take up to 48 hours for DNS to propagate. I find that translate.google.com updates a lot faster than most ISPs so having it translate the site at the domain you just updated the nameservers for might give you a glimpse into the future. Like so:

CNAME Alias is going to be whatever comes before the actual domain. In jesse.forthewin.com, the alias is jesse; In www.forthewin.com, the alias is www (following . not necessary). Host Name is going to be your TypePad blog. Unless you have a reason not to, set TTL to 1/2 Hour.

You'll notice that I have 2 blogs set up. One at jesse.forthewin.com, and another at www.forthewin.com. I'd like for users who target http://forthewin.com, rather than www.forthewin.com, to be redirected to www.forthewin.com. To do this, I had to set up domain forwarding.

If you've already got forwarding set up on the domain, click the Manage link under the Forwarding section in the Domain Manager. If you don't have forwarding set up, you'll see an Add link instead.

The settings I've entered above will have http://forthewin.com forwarding to http://www.forthewin.com, where my 2nd blog is.

If you're reading this, you probably already know how to set up a subdomain on your GoDaddy account, but in case you don't...

If you don't have an existing subdomain, you'll have an Add link instead of Manage. Click what you've got and get this:

Set the subdomain and forwarding. By entering jesse.forthewin.com for the jesse subdomain on forthewin.com, when people hit it, that's where they'll stay.